That said, it allows a great deal of research time and in turn, insight into a number of niche technologies and trends today. Web communities, rich interactions, multimedia installations, high definition video production and motion graphics and a number of other high end, deep subject matter areas are where we play.

All that in mind, when it comes to my assessment of the DevLearn08, I have to pause and take a deep breath. While I was impressed with the breadth of technologies, techniques and emerging trends I observed, and the sessions I attended, I had some preconceptions that I held shattered, when it came right down to it. I was under the impression that most companies had already joined the blogosphere and the wiki community on some level. The actual adoption of web2.0 tools in the average corporate eLearning group seems very low in my opinion, with less than one out of three eLearning Guild survey respondents stating that they have implemented or are in the process of implementing web2.0 technologies in their eLearning efforts.

Before getting to that let’s recap the event’s details, speakers and focus. The event took place from November 9, 2008 to November 14, 2008. It was held at San Jose’s Fairmont hotel, a beautiful place with a lot to offer conference goers (the neighborhood is densely packed with restaurants and entertainment). There were three keynote speakers, Tim O’Reilly, Dan Roam and John Medina. The conference seemed to be meant to acclimate eLearning professionals with some of the more advanced or new technological trends in eLearning today.

The first day was the Adobe Learning summit a co-located conference at the Fairmont. It was largely a commercial for Adobe’s eLearning focused tools, Captivate, Presenter and Connect. No real surprise here. There was a sneak peek given of Captivate Next (4). It looks pretty kick ass, IMHO. Flash widgets, AS3, much more flexible import and export options including respect for CS4 file layers really make this a tool worth looking out for. Additionally, they made mention of a dedicated eLearning development suite that looks to add some great capabilities to Flash, Dreamweaver as well as revised versions of a few other applications. I’m sure a lot more will come out this week with Adobe MAX going on in San Francisco. Really really cool stuff. After the day’s infomercial, there was a reception held at Adobe’s headquarters. It was a great night for networking and I got to meet some excellent people, guild members and staff alike. Not bad at all!

The next day was a collection of symoposiums and workshops. I attended a symposium entitled “The eLearning 2.0 symoposium” put on by the guild’s Tony Karrer and Brent Schlenker, DAU’s Mark Oehlert and Jane Hart. A day well spent, no doubt, full of revelations on my part as to where in technology’s adoptance timeline eLearning professionals sit. We were each provided with a copy of the eLearning Guild’s 360 report on using web2.0 technologies in the corporate eLearning marketplace. This report is packed with insights and I would highly recommend you join the guild to gain access to this invaluable resource. The day consisted of presentation coupled with loose team exercises focused on how and when to employ some technologies like wikis, blogs, rss, microblogging, as well as authoring tools and techniques. It was a open and honest discussion, where some participants voiced their concerns and barriers they encountered in implementing these technologies in their workplace.

It was here that I recognized the same old story I hear time and time again in working with clients on eLearning projects. Many of the people were seemingly unaware of the potential that these tools held for their team. How did a Wiki or blog contribute to the overall learning efforts for their company, etc., etc.? The ones that did recognize the need to allow for informal learning and collaboration seemed stagnated by their corporate hierarchy or held hostage by non-progressive IT teams. Sad. I feel that the afternoon helped many of the people in the room, with Mark Oehlert spending considerable time talking about the internal sales process in getting stakeholders to buy in to informal learning and advanced technologies. He really did a great job of stressing that when selling the solution to the IT or C-Level execs to focus on the business need and minimize the talk of the actual technical implementation. Simple advice, but effective.

The subsequent days were a blur of presentations and sessions. Some were more valuable than others. There was an alarming amount of sessions that really came off as advertisements for a product or service, which always smacks as tacky to me. I was sure to make note of this on the evaluation forms and hope the guild takes notice. I heard a number of other attendees making mention of this, too.

Some real brightspots…

• David Wilkins from Mzinga gave an interactive and fun presentation to a full room about eLearing 2.0 success stories, discussing the Intelpedia and a number of other informal learning approaches like community produced forums/knowledgebases.
• I also attended an interesting session on using cinematic techniques in the rich media you use n your training. This was largely about cinematography, and while the presenter wasn’t that great, the topic is definitely something that many eLearning producers should pay heed to. Production quality matters. People are tired of talking head videos delivered at a postage stamp size. With Flash’s ability to display HD quality video and the continued drop in CDN and videos server cost, it’s only a short matter of time until such quality will be expected in your training content as well.
• Reuben Tozman from EdCetera gave a fascinating session on Semantic Web technologies impact on training/eLearning content production. While the topic is a bit heady and probably won’t have a direct impact on content producers for some time, this is essentially the bridge to what will undoubtedly be known as web3.0. All content will have meaning. All content will be readable, searchable, findable by machine and accessible to users. Bold stuff!

All in all, the conference was a resounding success. I got much more familiarized with the eLearning community (while I have developed a lot of learning content, I have never really socialized much with the community at large), we got a chance to demo our stuff at DemoFest 2008 and I met a lot of great eLearning professionals. If you are one of those, don’t be surprised if I drop you a line soon.

The retina scanning, computer vision, highly targeted ads and sounds, jetpacks, sick-sticks, mag-lev track vehicles and of course the beautiful larger than life gestural interface that they used for piecing together the clues and crimescenes were great science fiction technology. Useful, seemingly unattainable and of course super sexy! Remember this:

Well, that style of computing is a little bit closer to reality now, thanks to Oblong’s g-Speak. Take a look and prepare to be jealous of these guys:

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

When will something like this be in your home? Well, it might be a while. But tradeshows/exhibits could get this very soon, it seems, judging by the overall completeness of the design. Beyond that, large scale systems, like logistics, medical imaging or perhaps spatial/environmental design would probably benefit most from easy visualization/manipulation as seen in g-Speak. There is a little more information at engadget on this, and I found a pretty useful bit of information at Manual Override.

It’s a brave new world! Let’s just hope we don’t get pre-crime departments along with this.

Beyond that, we are exiting a first round of usability testing on a great new elearning development application we are building at doctumlearning.com. We used Silverback for our testing. It’s a really really cool tool for Macs that records a screencast and a video feed from the iSight to create a record of the test. Hard to argue with video evidence, after all. The app is coming along strong, feature complete and ready to build some training. We’ve put together a great interface and the Flash based content it outputs is pretty dang nice.

Related to that, I will be attending DevLearn ‘08 next week. You can catch up with my twittering and possibly blogging from there. Tim O’Reilly is giving the keynote. Dan Roam is going to be there speaking, as is Dr. John Medina. Should be really really cool. We’ll be demoing at demofest, showing of the work we did with the International Society of Arboriculture that uses the Doctum platform. Psyched!

There is a one day Adobe elearning summit going on there, too, I’m definitely hitting that one. Are you planning on attending? Let me know! I’m interested in meeting up with other developers out there, so track me down.

If you twitter, be sure to check out the dl08 hashtag on twitter search and the devlearn08 one as well. This blog post here has a list of fellow twitterers headed to devLearn. Check it out.

You get the picture. I love music.

As a music fan, a flash designer with a strong interest in social media and RIA design, and as someone who has worked on and designed major music portals in the past, you can probably connect the dots and see that when a new music site launches, or redesigns (btw, Rollingstone.com is looking pretty good lately) I’m all over it. So when mtvmusic.com launched recently, you can probably guess I was all over it. After a few days of surfing, spending a couple hours sampling some of my favorite videos from over the years, I have to say over all… A really good effort for a first version of a site like this. What do I like?

1. Deep content - Most bands/artists I looked up had more than just their biggest hit available. Helmet, Faith No More and Tribe Called Quest all had deep cuts available for viewing. Nice work.
2. A minimalistic uncluttered design - By and large, they avoided MTV-ing it. It focuses you on the video and is not overly junked up with other animated or large elements.
3. A solid player - I have yet to experience an error with the Flash player controlling the videos.
4. An API - With the help of the Mashery, they have published an API to allow you to access and search the library at MTVMusic
5. A sprinkling of user community  features throughout - You can comment on and favorite videos, create a custom user profile URL and do a couple other standard social networking type things.
6. There is finally a way to watch videos on MTV again. Yay!

However, there are some key tings that need to be improved upon in order to really live up to the MTV brand with this new site.

1. Expose more content while you are viewing a video. After choosing a video to view, you no longer have access to any other tracks that artist has in the system, no other songs that may have been charting at the same time that that one was or other key cuts in that genre. The content at the media asset view level is primarily user comments (blecch, who cares about the 42nd person to say “I love the Talking Heads” on Once In a Lifetime?) and a large ad for a featured old school video like “Welcome to the Jungle” or Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”… I would think some contextualization and exposing of related content would lead to a much longer user experience and wikipedia like deep surfing session as the user jumps from video to video.
2. Absence of MTV History on the video content. Really, the only editorial content on the site is some cribbed Allmusic bios. Weak. We don’t need another allmusic.com, we already have a great one, allmusic.com. Dig out the archives and make note of what makes that Prodigy or Fat Boy Slim video notable. I’m sure that that info still exists somewere, get on it!
3. The player and site has no playlist/shuffle functionality. - There is currently no mechanism in the site to simply “watch MTV”. You watch one video and then mus search or browse to another video. With the lack of video navigation cues on the site, you can guess that this leads to a pretty disjointed experience.
4. Lack of the best music shows the network had. Yo! MTV Raps, Headbanger’s Ball and 120 Minutes could easily be recreated here, complete with episode lists done chronlgically containing the playlist for the show. Wanna see what Rikki Rachtman was rocking out to in the summer of 1991? No problem! Now, let me be clear… I don’t want old reruns of the show up there, I just want the videos.
5. The API is half baked. No direct links to the video files themselves for integration in custom Flex/Flash apps. No genre search. Metadata search about the videos is very very limited. There is currently no exposed way to search for Spike Jonze videos, for example. There is no way to find videos from 1983. No way to find metal videos. On and on. A stronger API would allow developers to add the features like playlists, etc before the site actually does, so it’s really in their best interests to get this rolling.
6. The videos appear to be encoded as FLV. If the videos were available as H.264 clips, you could get MTVMusic on your iPhone, Apple TV or any number of other mobile/settop boxes. As it is right now, you need the Flash player. Bummer. Beyond that, some of the tape transfers are pretty bad. Lots of scanlines, interlacing and macroblocking like artifacts are apparent on some of the older clips.

I’m sure I could pick some other +’s and -’s about the site out if I spent a bit more time writing this, but you get the idea… a great start, but still in need of so much in order to really jump to the top of the pile. I’m sure they have their eyes set on youtube (obviously with the comments taking center stage on the video’s screen), but I would caution against blindly adding social media content just to keep up with Google. Really, I just want my MTV, so anyway they can help that happen is probably to their advantage.

The description from his site:

I’ve created an AIR application to help developers and designers measure pixel distances on their screens. You tell if you need pixDIF if you answer yes to any of these questions:

1. Do you ever find that you need to measure the pixel distance/size of something when you’re not in Photoshop? Or, put another way: do you wish you could take the guides in Photoshop with you to the computer desktop?
2. Do you ever want to know what a graphical asset will look like in the context of a website or application. For instance, do you wish you could take an image and move it around over your website to see what it would like like in various places before you start writing the code to place it there?
3. Do you ever have a website or application design that you need to break up into pieces and build into a working site/app? And then as you write the code you need to see how close to the design you are?

If any of those answers are “yes” then jump over to the pixDIF page and check out the features and overview video tutorial.

Dan is a highly talented designer/developer and you really should check out his site.

I spent the last few days in Colorado, it was beautiful! I was the best man in a wedding there (in Estes Park), you can see some photos from the trip here. CO is a nice place with fantastic scenery and super tasty microbrews. Highly recommended.

While I was there, I got to meet Juan Sanchez, designer at Effective UI, and one of the main contributors to DeGrafa. He mentioned that Scalenine’s skin contest had completed. What a great pile of entries! I can’t wait to see the library grow and serve as the premier resource for Flex Designers on the web. How cool. Even cooler, was the fact that my Coworker, Heather Ford, was one of the winners with her DiscoType Theme! Awesome.

Beyond that, my students are begnining to build some mashups and make some progress learning Flex… Some recent ones they’ve made… GeekVahalla (a tech focused RSS Reader), TweetTally (a Twitter Tag cloud search). Dropped Passes (a sports focused RSS Reader). I hope to continue to post more as they pile up.

Finally, at The Iona Group, we are hard at work on our eLearning development platform, Doctum. We’re gearing up to launch and start talking to people/demoing it at DevLearn08. If you’d like to be made aware when we launch, head on over to DoctumLearning.com to get on our list of contacts. We have a full site launching soon with features, videos etc explanining what makes it different, but for now it’s kind of in a hush hush mode. Needless to say lots of work is going on and the system is shaping up to be pretty amazing, if I do say so myself.

1. A decent text editor. I use BBEdit, though I sometimes use Eclipse/Aptana as well. Say what you want about WYSIWYG editors, they’re easier, they’re getting better, they have a lot more features, etc… I really just haven’t ever liked them. Sure Dreamweaver is much better than it used to be, Coda isn’t bad and Espresso looks pretty promising, but they still seem to get between you and the real markup IMHO. They all seem to let you down with their previews eventually anyway, so what’s the appeal? I haven’t been able to pin that down, and so until then, I edit in a text editor and preview with a browser. Honestly, I have a version of BBEdit that is a little old, so I may eventually shift away from the slightly overpriced standby, but old habits die hard.
2. Omnigraffle is tops in my book for wireframing and process documents. Sitemaps, data design, UI prototypes, etc pretty much always start here for me. I use it for sketches and for client delvierables alike. It’s easy, fast and extensible. I love it.  To enhance the already great app, head to Graffletopia.
3. Photoshop is most likely in your toolbox, too. That or Fireworks. I use the save for web for all my images feature now that Imageready is no more.
4. Kuler/ColourLovers. I seem to switch back and forth between the two color palette creation sites. Each has their pros and cons. I like Kuler’s flash tool interface a tad better, but ColourLover’s community is just awesome. When I feel creatively stagnated, I often pop over to one of them just to work up some palettes and get inspired.
5. The Web Developer Toolbar. If you don’t have this installed on your Firefox installation you are simply wasting too much time debugging and validating your markup and CSS. With the built in guides, grid and rulers, the toolbar in many ways seems to obsolete the tools in many of the WYSIWYG editors out there. I could probably write a post on just this tool alone, because each top level menu in the bar is loaded with useful utilities and features.
6. Firebug is a great combo/tag team tool to use with the Developer toolbar. The DOM inspector, HTTP request logger and header inspector along with the great inline CSS and HTML editing tools just make this another have to have editor tool for your browser.
7. Colorzilla is another handy little add-on that puts a eyedropper tool in your browser’s status bar. Sample the color of any pixel in your viewport, use the zoom to get nice and precise and then copy the hex color to your clipboard to use in an editor or your image editing program. Saves a lot of back and forth between Photoshop and the editor for me.
8. VMWare Fusion/Windows. Yes, we live in a windows dominated world. So, for my cross platform testing, I have to have a Windows partition with IE6, 7 and Firefox installed. I use IE Developer toolbars over there and also have used IE Watch in the past to track HTTP requests in the browser that everyone detests. I’m hoping we can drop support for IE6 soon, but I’m not holding my breath.
9. Pngbehavior/Pngfix. I can’t wait to not need this. But, until IE6 is no longer in my list of browsers to test against, I am going to need to be able to use one of these methods to get PNGs to render as transparent images in this aged browser. I was thinking about not including this in my list, but again, I don’t think I have produced a site in the last several years that didn’t need this.
10. My Delicious bookmarks. With nearly 800 web design focused bookmarks and no filler, this resource is one I use to solve quirky rendering problems and find inspiration or tips first. It’s like a mini Google of web design tricks, but all tagged by yours truly. Now, I can’t guarantee the answer to everything web is in there, but more than likely there is something I have saved in my account that you can use.

So, there you have it. My must haves. What have I missed? What can’t you live without in the W3C sea? I’m interested in learning more, so as always, let me know what you are using to create your work.

Erik Natzke, Peter Elst, Aral Balkan, Keith Peters, Grant Skinner, the list goes on and on. Reading the recaps, including a statement by the conference’s organizer, John Davey, it seems as though one presentation stands out in it’s audacity, poignancy and message enough to really raise some hackles, eyebrows and maybe even a shaking fist or two. Jonathan Harris, designer of We Feel Fine as well as a few other online art pieces, had the last session of the show. Sounds like it was a doozy. Take a look at this shot:

In short, it seems as though Jonathan characterized the bulk of the work in digital art as being “tinkering” or “experiments”. It did not make many of the attendees happy, understandably so. Here is a bit of an outsider, crashing the party with some disheartening words to close a great conference attended by some of the most talented Flash using designers around. I would agree that many of the things I see out there are just that, too… however, the notion that something has to be heavy on message or ideology in order to be important or able to be fully enjoyed seems a bit pretentious to me. Much has been written on the topic, with an excellent post at Peter Elst’s blog featuring comments written by many of the aforementioned Flash talent as well as Jonathan himself. I’ll mention that you really should go check that out, as much of it is very thought provoking.

I have had conversations with a few people in the last several years that result in the same sort of conclusion for me when discussing heady topics like this. Why overanalyze what makes you happy with the work you produce? Sure, self progress and pushing a medium or message are certainly good things to aspire to, but they are not the only things that determine success in your work. We Feel Fine is cool, but is it any better than Joshua Davis’ fine compositions and now equally amazing textile work? How about Natzke’s brilliant stuff? Robert Hodgin’s amazing Processing sketches? A particularly well done Flash game or interactive museum installation? Will any of it have lasting appeal in 25 years+? Well, I think that if anyone asked that before they produced the work, would they even start it?

Probably not nearly as often, and that would be a shame. So with that, please continue your tinkering. I know I am.